It took me a little while to recall the correct turns to take and roads to go down, but eventually we finally found our way to the house I had been looking for. Every time I came down here as a kid, I wanted to go find these houses and explore them. I still had an old bamboo picture frame that I had stolen one time.
I drove far down the road and pulled off into the open gates of a farmer's field. Jacob said he knew the people who owned the land, but I couldn’t remember who they were. I kept thinking that maybe it was vacant, but people around here hadn't died in mass quantities like Hartland. I put the truck in park and locked the doors before we started walking down the road for a couple of minutes. We walked in silence, my boots crunching the gravel beneath my feet. Breelyn walked in the grass and started laughing out of nowhere. “Dude, imagine if I just ate it and rolled down the embankment.” I started to laugh. Next to her was a small ditch, but on the other side of it was a very steep drop-off.
“I’d never find you again. You’d fall into the creek and float away.”
“Float all the way back to Hartland. Safest route back,” We both laughed again. I slowed my walking suddenly, coming to a complete stop and listening to our surroundings. We were surrounded by fields and forests, so there were bound to be animals, but that’s not what this sound was. It sounded like a vehicle. I grabbed Breelyn’s arm and pulled her to the opposite side of the road. I climbed into the weeds. She barrel rolled behind me until we were both lying on our stomachs, face down and breathing louder than ever. I could hear my heart beating in my ears. Walking down the road exposed like that made us susceptible to the people who drove around looking for targets. I didn’t know if there were any of them down here, but I didn’t want to end up like Blane.
I buried my face into the ground and curled up. I knew I was protected by the tall weeds, but the sound of the tires on the gravel was getting louder and closer. I clutched my keys and squeezed Breelyn’s hand. They passed just as soon as they came, and then they were gone. Nothing happened. I didn’t notice I had been holding my breath until we got up and stepped back onto the gravel. I pulled weeds out of my hair, then grabbed a stick stuck in the pocket of Breelyn's jacket. We both stared down the road, open and exposed, and frozen like deer in headlights. We had to make sure they were gone. Everyone has experienced what those kids in Hartland can do, and nobody will look at similar cars the same again. We continued our walk, sharing the same sigh of relief, and I'm sure she also felt the pit open up in my stomach.
The last time I was in this house was two years ago, and it was hours past midnight. I haven't seen it in the daylight before. It was nice not having to carry a flashlight and worrying about shining it the right way. We pushed through the weeds taller than us. It was like thick, yet hollow, beige bamboo sticks growing out of the ground. They liked to grab onto any part of loose fabric that was on me, and I still had my hoodie on. We went for the clearest spot we could find. I turned to talk to Breelyn. “What if there are, I don’t know, bobcats that live here?” I kept glancing forward to watch my step, but the weeds were so thick that it wasn’t doing much anyway. I knew we were about to reach a spot where the grass was only up to our waist, but then the ground was gone beneath me. Breelyn grabbed my arm before I noticed I was falling. I heard her make a warning sound, but we were walking way too fast for me to react to it. She yanked me back, both of us lying there and laughing. It was our response to danger.
“Where did the ground go?” It took me a second to catch my breath. I stood up again, helping her to her feet. “Dude, how did you see that?”
“I tried to warn you, but it was too late,” She released a sigh to conclude her laughter. We both took a step forward and realized what I had almost fallen into. The side porch of the house used to be here, I remembered that, but now it was just a huge hole in the ground. A hole that led to the basement…which was flooded. I took the flashlight from my pocket and shone it down into the cavity. The water looked to be about two feet deep at the most, if not one foot, but it was full of old house debris, the broken porch pieces, and black tinted water. I could see the living room shining down into the water from above. The floor had collapsed in there, too. “Safe to say we’re not going into the basement.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” I turned off the flashlight and stepped back. “Let’s go in through the front. There used to be a porch there, too, but it collapsed back onto the land instead of into the basement.
We walked around to the front, which was surrounded by thicker and windier branches. I went first and ducked down. I half crawled my way to the front. The sticks were grabbing the loose fabric of my hoodie, dragging me backwards, and slowing down my progress. I finally got to the door, but the trees were pressing against it. The door swung outwards. The tree’s limbs needed to be moved. I scanned the area we were standing on first to make sure it was stable, but it really didn’t seem so. There was nothing I could do about it, though. Along the concrete structure that held up the house, the dirt was slowly washing away. I saw a dark, thin crack between it and the ground. It leads into the basement. The whole foundation was starting to settle into the ground. Breelyn saw it too, but we didn’t care.
I tried to pry the door open, but the tree limbs kept slamming it shut. Breelyn started laughing at me. She tried to hold it back, but it wasn’t working very well. I needed to get on the other side of it. I got down onto my hands and knees again and climbed underneath it, but this time the branch latched on to me a little tighter. I couldn’t move. Breelyn gripped it and pulled as hard as she could until I could get to the other side. I planned to force the sticks back with my body and move in the direction of the door, and it actually worked. Breelyn took the same path as me and climbed inside, and I was right behind her. The door slammed shut behind us. I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to get back out, but I knew there were windows, and in the worst-case scenario, we’d have to go into the basement.
We still needed a flashlight, but the daylight was shining through the old windows. The windows look frosted, but they were just so old and filthy that they gave off that illusion. This place has been ransacked already of anything truly valuable, so the whole living room was just a couple of overturned and broken couches. Overall, though, there was drywall and a boatload of insulation from the attic. It littered the floors, coating the floorboards to the point you couldn’t even see the planks. There was an old fireplace, though. Around it was red brick. That style of house isn't built anymore. Next to it was a very large and very old VHS player. “Do you think there’s still a tape in there?“ I leaned down and pushed the flap inward.
“Hell no,“ I pulled my finger back and stood up. I wiped my finger on my clothes. “Probably just got five different diseases from that. There's a buildup of, I don’t know, just a bunch of other stuff in it,“ I shivered a bit. I look to the right to see the old dining room. There’s no furniture in there other than a couple of overturned tables. I’m sure the rest of it was in the basement, now given a big hole has been opened up right in the middle of the floor. We could see past the dining room into the kitchen. The cabinets and the countertop line the walls, and the oven is still there, too. All around it, though, were books, containers, children’s toys, clothes, and even an old broom handle without the broom still on it. I turned on my flashlight to get a better look at this stuff. There were windows everywhere, something that I commented on years ago when I came here. Still, the sun didn’t reach the middle of the house very well since a couple of big trees shielded the windows.
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We went in the opposite direction from the dining table. It was a very small hallway. I turned to my right and was met with a horror movie-worthy sight. It was the basement stairs. There were old, thin planks that formed the steps. They were covered in dust, and old nails were poking out of the top of them. The paint on the wall was peeling off all the way down, and the last two steps were submerged in the black water. We were not about to go down there. We went straight instead. There wasn’t much in the corner room we found ourselves in. It was similar to the living room, but instead of an old couch in the way, there were a few random items. Amongst the insulation and broken drywall were old and flat shoes. There was a bowling bag lying there, too, but no bowling ball.
We turned the corner and walked into the kitchen, but we couldn’t go very far. The floor was caved in here, too, with only two very thin planks that stretched from one side of the kitchen to the opposite side. The rest is just a dark hole. Neither of us had that big of a death wish. There were still books stacked multiple feet high on the countertops, and old pots and pans and children’s toys spread everywhere. I wondered how they got into the kitchen. I thought back to whenever I used to wonder how haunted houses came to be, that and abandoned buildings too. I still didn’t understand how children’s toys got in the kitchen, but I did understand how everything got ransacked. That’s what some of the gas stations looked like along the highway now.
I tried to open the door to the bathroom, but something was blocking it. It was the old mirror that had fallen from the countertop in front of the sink. It was wedged between the wall and the door. There was no way I could get through. We crept along the wall instead, so we could look around the corner, but the kitchen leads straight to the living room. There was a very small, maybe 2-foot-wide section of planks that divided the two holes, but most of it was caved in. There was nothing worth grabbing on the other side anyway. Breelyn bent down, grabbed the old broom handle, and scooted it across one of the thin planks. She used it to slide a book over to her. The cover was completely water-damaged. You couldn’t tell what it said or what colors it used to be, but when she opened it, the words looked perfectly fine. “An original copy of Charles Dickens,“ she flipped through the pages. There were even some colored pictures in it. It has been a long time since I saw pictures in a chapter book. She closed it and left it by the wall.
“I might be paranoid,“ I clicked my light off and spoke in a low voice. I could feel the heavy air around us. I knew we were breathing in plenty of chemicals, one of them being afestus. The air was so dense that it kind of made it hard to breathe. We definitely should’ve brought masks. What do we have to lose? “Do you hear something outside?“ We both instinctively held our breath. We listened for noises outside, but it was dead silent. I swear I could hear my heartbeat, or maybe it was my head throbbing. I hadn’t drunk water in a while. We held the silence for a little bit longer, and that’s when we heard a crunch. A voice followed it, a male's voice. We could hear multiple footsteps now.
I put a finger over my mouth, motioned for her to be quiet, and then waved my hand for her to follow me. She knocked at her head as if to tell me something, and I started forward. I stayed along the wall, scooting into the space between the living room and the kitchen. To our right were the stairs, which went upwards. I stayed low and slowly stepped foot by foot to avoid the creaking ground. I heard the front door open and a cracking stick. I could hear them inside. We got to the stop at the top of the stairs, but there were two ways for us to go. There was a door to the right, but the floor in the middle of the room was gone. There was no way to get past it. The room was mirrored on the left side of the house, too, and there was a hole in the middle of it as well. There’s nothing we could do. I had Breelyn get in front of me and stay along the wall. We chose the left side, which looked a little more stable. There was a dresser that was a little taller than us. One of the doors was open, and an old white dress shirt was on a hanger that was hooked around the top of the door. If we could get there, we could get inside the dresser. We both vanished behind the wall, and I whispered to her.
“See if you can get to the dresser. It’s our best bet. I think the living room is below us, so if we fall, it won’t be catastrophic.“ She nodded and, very slowly, heel to toe, slid her way to the dresser. I stayed as close to her as I could, without being too close. If one of us fell, maybe the other could reach them in time if we kept some distance. She suddenly stepped, and the plank started to creak. Up until now, the floor hadn’t made any sound. We stopped moving, and I found myself crossing my fingers. I hope whoever was downstairs didn’t hear us. I could make out two different voices, but then there were a third and a fourth that I could hear speak occasionally. None of them was very familiar. It sounded like four boys. I knew that much. The voices were familiar when they spoke certain words, but when you have that many people together and speaking all at once, of course, that sounds familiar. Even if it’s just one word that they pronounce differently, it sounds familiar because someone else you know does it too.
Breelyn kept her foot flat on the floor at all times. She slid it across the ground instead of picking it up and adding new weight onto the planks. This seemed to work better, but it slowed us down a little bit. I could hear them in the kitchen. I looked back at the wall that was farthest from the stairs. I could see a little bit of flashlight reflecting off of it. I could barely make out what they were saying.
“Are you sure about this?“ I heard one of them ask. The flashlight disappeared from the wall.
“This house is lined up with a picture,“ one of them replied. “I’ve seen it before. I’d expect this to be the place she goes; where else would we check out? “ I could only hear the first part of the conversation, but I heard him mention "she". I didn’t have enough time to wonder what he was talking about before Breelyn's foot went all the way through the ground. The plank gave way beneath her, and I watched her whole leg disappear under the ground. As for her other foot, it was held up on a sturdy point. Her knee was brought up to her chest, and the rest of her body slammed down towards the side that had fallen. That broke the remaining planks. I could hear the intruders downstairs make some sort of exclamation. They knew we were here, there’s no doubt about it. There's also no doubt that those planks were gonna hold us anyway. I went to grab her, but the place beneath us started to creak, too. Somehow, between all the loud sounds of her panic and me scrambling to help her, she found a way to the other side of the hole. She was holding onto the handles of the dresser. Below her was a large and gaping hole. We were above the dining room, like we had anticipated. Her foot gave way, and her body fell forward. She gripped the handle on the dressing wardrobe so tightly that her knuckles turned white. Her legs swung back and forth, but they weren’t swinging far enough for me to grab them. She was dangling above a hole that led directly to the basement. That's the portion of the living room we were in. I got down on my hands and knees and tried to reach out farther to grab her, but I couldn’t make it. She was losing energy, so she couldn’t speak, but I could hear her stressed-out breathing. I could see the fear on her face. She tried reaching back to grab my hand, but her other arm started to give out. She couldn’t hold on with one hand, so she quickly retracted it and held on again.
“Shit, shit,” my arm couldn’t stretch any farther. I really couldn’t reach her. I had almost forgotten about the voices downstairs. I could hear them walking around, and I saw a light shining on her legs. I heard voices coming from the stairway, too. They were coming up here. The most I could do was defend her. I grabbed my gun and turned around to face whoever was walking up the stairs, then I heard another sound behind me. I turned back to see the handles' last moment of attachment before one of the two screws snapped off. It swung her into the wall, and then she slipped on impact. She disappeared beneath the floor. I screamed, completely forgetting anyone else was there. I forgot about defending myself, about defending her. I couldn’t hear the voices anymore. All sounds around me were replaced by the ringing in my ears. I had trouble catching my breath as I peered down into the hole. I could see nothing. hear nothing. I wasn’t even blinking. I just stared, wide-eyed, down into the hole, but it felt like eternity. Breelyn was gone.
